


The Undiscovered Secret

by motherbearof3



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Angst, F/M, Possible birth defect, Pregnancy, SVU next generation, Stories parents don't tell kids till they grow up, The Undiscovered Country is mentioned, fathers and sons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-13 18:17:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18036431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motherbearof3/pseuds/motherbearof3
Summary: Someone mentioned on Twitter today had anyone ever written a fic about Noah finding out what Rafael did in The-Episode-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. My brain went, sure! we can do this, and here we are. Not long, full of angst but always with a happy ending, because that's the way I roll.





	The Undiscovered Secret

There was a knock at his door and the Honorable Rafael Barba picked up his head from the law journal he’d been reading to look at it over the tops of his glasses and frowned. No one knocked at his door. Either his clerk called to tell him there was someone to see him, or people like his wife, Olivia, their son, Noah and cheeky DA’s like Dominick Carisi simply opened the door and let themselves in. Captain Rollins-Carisi still had the courtesy to knock. But he credited that to her Southern manners.

“Come,” he said, loud enough to be heard on the other side of the thick old wood, and the door slowly opened.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Noah! _Mijo,_ why did you knock? You never knock.” Rafael took in the somber look on his son’s face. “What’s wrong? Is something wrong with your mother? Abuela?”

The young man shook his head.

“No. Mom’s fine. I guess Abuela’s fine too.”

But his father knew something wasn’t fine. Noah blue eyes were focused on the floor in front of his desk and his brown curls were wildly askew, telling Rafael he’d been running his hands through them. Hands that were currently shoved in the pocket of his trousers, pushing back the sides of his suit jacket to reveal a pair of brightly patterned suspenders. His tie was off and the tail of it was peeking out of a jacket pocket. Rafael stood up and went to the small refrigerator in the corner. Removing a bottle of water, he held it out.

“Or something stronger?”

The young man shook his head and took the bottle of water. Then he threw himself down on the leather sofa against the wall, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Rafael watched his throat work as if he was fighting tears before he opened the bottle and took a drink. But he waited for his son to speak as he got his own bottle of water, cracked it open and sipped. This was the way it had always worked with them. He learned when Noah was small that he would talk when he was ready. From the day they rescued him from Sheila Porter and he admitted he was afraid his mother wasn’t really going to join them on “vacation”, to when he told his father he wanted to marry Jesse.

Noah and Jesse had been married for almost two years. She was an NYPD officer and he a lawyer. Neither of their career choices came as a big surprise to anyone. _Jesse_. Who was pregnant. Rafael’s stomach dropped to his toes and he sat beside his son, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Are Jesse and the baby okay, Noah?” he asked softly.

Noah lifted his eyes to meet his father’s green ones. He swallowed hard.

“There -- there might be something wrong with the baby,” he said.

His lips trembled and Rafael was looking not at a 26 year old man but a six year old boy. He reached out and pulled Noah into his arms. No matter that his son had surpassed him in height in ninth grade. Noah gladly buried his face in his father’s neck, wrapped his arms around his waist and drew a shuddering breath, gritting his teeth to keep from sobbing. They were just supposed to get an ultrasound to find out if they were having a boy or a girl.

“Tell me, _mijo,_ ” Rafael murmured, smoothing down his son’s curls.

Noah pulled back from his father and scrubbed his face with his hands, taking another deep breath and a drink of water.

“We had an appointment today,” he began.   
  
Rafael nodded. He knew that. He and Olivia had a bet going. He said girl, she said boy. Whoever lost had to change the first poopie diaper.

“They were just going to tell us whether it’s a boy or a girl. But the tech stopped and left the room. She said she needed to get the doctor,” Noah told him. “And when the doctor came back, he told us -- told us there’s something wrong with the baby’s brain.”

“Mother of God,” Rafael breathed. It was every expectant parent’s nightmare. To be told there was something wrong with your child before it was even born.

“We have to go back next week for a better scan -- three dimensional or something, I don’t know. They said Jesse has a choice, Dad, because she’s not to 24 weeks yet.”

Again, Rafael nodded. As a judge and a former SVU prosecutor, he knew the abortion laws in New York state.

“But we don’t have that long to decide, because if we wait past 24 weeks, we would have to prove the baby wouldn’t be -- “ Noah stopped. He couldn’t say ‘viable’ about his own child. “Couldn’t live once it was born.

“Dad, what do we do? What would you do? I know mom was too old to have a baby when you got married, but what if she had and what if there was something wrong with it? The doctor said if Jesse takes the baby to term, and it survives once it’s born, it would have a poor quality of life. It would never speak or walk. It might not be able to breathe without help.”

Noah’s voice faded away in Rafael’s ears as he was taken back twenty years to his last case with SVU. The Householder case.

“ _Mijo,_ ” he stopped and cleared his throat. “Do you remember when I left the DA’s office? Stopped working with Mom? You were just little, but --”

“That was the summer you started teaching, right?” Noah interrupted. “Before you and Mom got married.”

“Um, yeah.” That wasn’t exactly accurate, but that wasn’t the story Rafael had in mind at the moment. “Listen, Noah, we told you I left the DA’s office because I needed a change of career. That was true, but we didn’t tell you the reason I needed a change.”

“What was the reason?” Noah asked.

“Because I turned off the life support on a terminally ill baby.”

Rafael closed his eyes and he could still see baby Drew in his NICU bassinet. Hear the Bach concerto Maggie Householder was playing on her phone over the whoosh of the ventilator pushing air into the baby’s tiny lungs. Smell the roses in the vase on the table.

He opened them and looked at Noah, who was looking at him in disbelief.

“Jack McCoy charged me with murder. It was Peter Stone’s first case. I was found not guilty.”

“What? Why?”

After taking a drink from his own bottle of water to wet his throat, Rafael told his son the whole story. From Aaron Householder kidnapping his own son and holding him hostage with a paintball gun to McCoy telling him to get the man to take a plea, to his visit to the hospital where he encountered Maggie and told her her son could be at peace. And when she was unable to flip the switch on the ventilator herself, did it for her. He told him about the degenerative disease the baby had been diagnosed with before he was born and how his mother had decided to carry him to term, rather than terminate the pregnancy, against the advice of her doctor.

“Maggie, his mother, suffered along with her son as his body began to fail,” Rafael explained. “Every time I looked at her, I saw your mother and how if something ever happened to you I couldn’t bear to watch her suffer.”

His voice cracked, and tears filled his eyes, remembering all those years later, telling Stone how he felt guilty about what he’d done but knowing he’d do it again.

Now it was the younger Barba who pulled the elder into his arms, offering comfort. Father and son held each other, both shedding tears over the past and the possible future.

Finally, Rafael pulled back and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. He offered it to Noah, who chuckled and shook his head, pulling out his own.

“So what do you think we should do, Dad?”

Rafael put a hand on his son’s shoulder and squeezed it affectionately.

“I think you should go home and talk to Jesse some more. But I also think you shouldn’t make any decisions until after the second ultrasound.”

As usual, Noah knew his father was right.

“Can I tell Jesse about -- ?”

“Sure. As long as she won’t hate me,” Rafael offered a small grin.

“Jess could never hate you.”

 

A week later, while Noah and Jesse were in the exam room having the second ultrasound, Rafael, Olivia, Sonny and Amanda sat in a an adjacent waiting room; each couple holding hands. After nearly thirty minutes, Noah appeared in a doorway and motioned for them to come into the room.

“Please, God,” Olivia whispered and reached out to grasp Amanda’s hand briefly.

The mothers entered the dim room first, followed by the fathers. Jesse sat on a table, swinging her feet. Noah went to stand beside her and took her hand.

“We thought you might want to see your grandson,” she said, unable to keep the smile from breaking across her face.

“He’s fine. He’s perfect,” said Noah, his blue eyes sparkling with happiness. “The other scan was wrong.”

There was a collective exhale of relief from the other two couples as they looked at a monitor on the wall. It showed a 3-D image of the baby in Jesse’s womb, moving its arms and legs. It was the most beautiful thing Rafael had ever seen.

**Author's Note:**

> So a few notes. This all ties together as part of my Enchanted, Barson universe. Some things will make more sense once I finish Enchanted, which should come soon, and move on to the next part of their lives. But this specifically, spins off from Overheated and Carving Out A Future, which are about our SVU next gen lovebirds and might actually end up as part of COAF later on.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this. I wrote it quickly but I'm pleased with it except maybe the ending. I could have added more of Liv, Amanda and Sonny, but this was intended to be between Noah and Rafael.
> 
> Also, the title might suck. It's late -- nearly midnight EST and I'm bad enough with titles when it's not.


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